Page 539 - tess-of-the-durbervilles

man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He matched
Crivelli’s dead Christus. His sunken eye-pits were of morbid
hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The angular hol-
lows and lines of his aged ancestors had succeeded to their
reign in his face twenty years before their time.
‘I was ill over there, you know,’ he said. ‘I am all right
now.’
As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs seemed to
give way, and he suddenly sat down to save himself from fall-
ing. It was only a slight attack of faintness, resulting from the
tedious day’s journey, and the excitement of arrival.
‘Has any letter come for me lately?’ he asked. ‘I received
the last you sent on by the merest chance, and after consid-
erable delay through being inland; or I might have come
sooner.’
‘It was from your wife, we supposed?’
‘It was.’
Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on
to him, knowing he would start for home so soon.
He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much
disturbed to read in Tess’s handwriting the sentiments ex-
pressed in her last hurried scrawl to him.

O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not
deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never,
never forgive you! You know that I did not intend to wrong
you—why have you so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel
indeed! I will try to forget you. It is all injustice I have received
at your hands!

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